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Taking the agile transformation journey

How can financial services start their Agile Transformation?

OVERVIEW

It’s a hyper-competitive and ever-changing business environment out there.

Financial services firms find themselves pressured from many fronts to innovate faster, better, and with escalating frequency. An agile transformation across the enterprise that embraces collaboration can help firms to harness the full potential of digital technology.

While the notion of adopting an agile methodology is familiar to most financial services firms, the execution of an agile transformation is often unintendedly incomplete.

ROADBLOCKS

Transforming into an agile organization sounds ideal in theory. However, in practice can be a different story. There are a number of common roadblocks financial services firms might encounter along the way that can derail the transformation. These roadblocks typically fall within the following areas:

Business Strategy Planning
Strategic planning requires a strong linkage between IT and the rest of the business. Misalignment, misperceptions, conflicting priorities, or failure to execute can stall or stop the process.

Operations
Effective agile organizations should have foundational operational elements that support speed and flexibility.

Build
Sometimes firms have difficulty scaling agile teams from the single to the enterprise level, meaning the transformation never takes hold across the organization.

Cultural Transformation
Adopting the “agile way” is more than simply implementing a new approach to innovating. It requires a fundamental culture shift and a strong leadership commitment.

ESTABLISH THE RIGHT FOUNDATION

The foundational elements for an agile transformation are fixed. All aspects of the enterprise should be aligned under a strategic imperative to discover and evaluate, prioritize, build and operate, and analyze the results in an ongoing process of continuous improvement.

While firms can achieve a great deal in the transformation to agile within the first 365 days, the journey is never complete. By nature, being agile is a process of ongoing continuous improvement.

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